The Simple Methods

It’s the birthday of American novelist and poet Louisa May
Alcott, born in Germantown Pennsylvania (1832). Alcott grew up
primarily in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, one of four daughters of
the prominent Transcendentalist philosopher and educator, Amos Bronson
Alcott, and his wife Abigail. The Alcott’s social circle during Louisa’s
youth included men such as Ralph W. Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and
Nathaniel Hawthorne. By the age of thirteen, Louisa had already decided
she would become a writer, but was also aware that the family was in an
increasingly dire financial state. Setting aside writing to find
suitable ways to earn money to support the family, she worked as a
domestic and as a part-time tutor. She found both occupations
distasteful and, by the time she was 19 years old, she’d begun in
earnest trying to earn a living from writing fictionshe began
selling sensational adult stories (which she called her "blood and
thunder tales") to magazines like The Saturday Evening
Gazette and Frank
Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. These potboilers were published
under a variety of pen names. In 1868 she published her classic of young
adult fiction, Little Women, which proved to be a landmark in
her writing career and opened many professional doors for her. She died
in 1888, at the age of 56, of pneumonia.

It's the birthday of writer and theologian C.S. Lewis, born
in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898. In his teenage years at English boarding
school he proclaimed himself an atheist, but by his early 30s he was
teaching English at Oxford University and said, "Picture me alone
in my room, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for
a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so
earnestly desired not to meet." He wrote 40 books, including the
children’s series, The Chronicles of Narnia.

It is the birthday of Madeleine L’Engle, American writer,
born in New York City in 1918. She is the author of more than 40 books
of fiction and non-fiction, and is best known for her young adult
novels, A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door
(1973), and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) known as the Time
Trilogy. She is currently ranked by Publisher’s Weekly as one
of the 10 best selling children’s authors in the U.S. today.

It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Sue
Miller, born in Boston, 1943, who started writing when she was
35 after jobs as a day-care worker, waitress, model, and high-school
teacher. She took a creative writing course to help her with a story she
was thinking about. She was married with children and said she was
annoyed by "the postfeminist novels which suggested that all you
need to do is shed your husband and then you enter this glorious new
life of accomplishment and ease." Miller's first book came out to
great acclaim a few months later, in 1986, The Good Mother. Her
fourth novel, While I Was Gone, was published this
February.

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Although he has edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound forges a new path for Garrison Keillor, as a poet of light verse.
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